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Book Review: “Who Will Rise Up?” Part I

Like most autobiographies, Who Will Rise Up? by George “Jed” Smock is a self-important narrative that smacks of purple prose sporting overwrought acclaims to his own prowess and condemnation of exaggerated villainy in the world. The strange bias of his writing is steeped in most paragraphs, any number of which take swipes at his old life. He also intersperses his text with Bible verses, which, instead of using italics for emphasis, he bolds so that they break up the narrative and legibility of the text.

The title of his work comes from the Bible Psalm 94:16, “Who will rise up for me against the evildoers? or who will stand up for me against the workers of iniquity?”

If Jed’s theatrics on campus are any indication he certainly thinks romantically about his past experiences, so it is difficult to separate fact from silvery fiction in his book. Fun sections come out hither and yon when he snidely chuckles about how he can exorcize demons from people. One event happened on a college campus when he shouted in “Latin” at a man assaulting a woman—to which the man allegedly reacted by becoming docile, said “Okay,” and then left. (p. 70-71). Another account didn’t actually manage anything like expelling a demon. Instead he lay hands on a drunken man while in jail and shouted at him, startling the man awake. Jed calls the drunk man a “wino” in his prose. The assault, combined with him beginning to preach loudly at others in the jail cell with him, led the jailers to put him into his own cell (p. 87).

He has been the subject of multiple civil rights violations in regards to free speech on public property; however Jed doesn’t care about civil rights as much as he does spreading his own word. He capriciously condemns those who would defend his own right to speak freely and fails repeatedly to hold up his own civic responsibility when he feels like he’s “saved enough souls.” A great deal of his vituperative speech is directed against the culture that would stand with him in opposition to the sort of bad behavior of being arrested for speaking publicly. He will toe the line to get wrongfully arrested; but rarely follows through after the fact.

Like a lot of others like him, he also totally ignores or derides civil rights when they don’t agree with his agenda. He takes advantage of them when they’re in his favor, martyrs himself for them when it affects his freedom of speech; but when it comes to opening freedom of religion and speech to others he quickly shuts up or claims incredulity. In one example he is upset that chapel services and instruction had become optional—as if Christianity is the only proper and right religion to speak on campuses—and then decried this as a deathblow (p. 102). As if college students shouldn’t have a choice as to whether they’re going to listen to him or not; he espouses this while only a few chapters earlier he likes to laud himself for how many people “Didn’t have to stop and listen to him, but did anyway.”

“They disdain the one Book [sic] that unites races, ages, ethnic groups and economic classes into a common purpose.” (p. 106-107). We have to assume he means the Bible when he says “Book,” but really this book is also the origin of their god commanding the murder and genocide of multiple groups who were not the chosen people. So much for uniting ethnic groups; this book has been the basis of a multitude of atrocities based on these commands. The above quote is a common denominator of Jed’s style of cherry picking Christian mythology. In an earlier chapter he retells the story of Lot and the angels, only to leave out how Lot offered his daughters to the mob that came calling lustfully for the angels (presumably so that the mob would rape his daughters instead of the angels.)